deciding on a new vid card. GTX 970?

[Andovar]

Check out my PSU video, it explains all of this in detail....

adoredtv, thanks for all your info here, It's been extremely helpful.
Especially after watching your PSU video. I opened my case and confirmed that my PSU has two six pin connectors, and 2 6+2 connectors, so it should be plenty for the 290X requirements. It's an xtreme gear 700W psu. Not sure if that's a good brand or not, but just going by your 'connectors test', it seems like it should be a legitimate 700W (or close to it).

Anyway, I just pulled the trigger on this puppy: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202145
Will report back after I get all my new toys setup.

 

[adoredtv]

adoredtv, thanks for all your info here, It's been extremely helpful.
Especially after watching your PSU video. I opened my case and confirmed that my PSU has two six pin connectors, and 2 6+2 connectors, so it should be plenty for the 290X requirements. It's an xtreme gear 700W psu. Not sure if that's a good brand or not, but just going by your 'connectors test', it seems like it should be a legitimate 700W (or close to it).

Anyway, I just pulled the trigger on this puppy: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202145
Will report back after I get all my new toys setup.

That's a really bad PSU unfortunately. Cyberpower PC? I've read up on it and it's getting some really bad reviews. I'll try to do some further checks - while the connector test is a good one it's not 100% failsafe and I have my doubts that this PSU could handle dual graphics cards for example, even though it has the connectors.

According to Cyberpower the PSU can handle 38A on the 12V rail, so it should be enough for a 290X which needs 33A. It's cutting it a bit closer than I'd like but it *should* be fine. Just be aware that it's known to be a PSU with issues.

If you decide to get a new one this is a good Corsair PSU for $45 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...9028&cm_re=corsair_psu-_-17-139-028-_-Product

Or even this 500W one at $35 will be good enough - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...9027&cm_re=corsair_psu-_-17-139-027-_-Product

Nice card btw, that's an awesome deal you got on that.

 

[adoredtv]

very interesting indeed.

stock clocks aside, most 980s hit above the titanX clock speeds which is exactly the raw HP we are needing to run image screen rift setups

clearly nvidia is the current champ, but whats in store for the future who knows.

all costs aside, i still believe the extra HP from nvidia is beneficial for VR.

show me something to change my mind and ill sell my 980 right now and switch to AMD.
havent been with AMD since they bought ATI from my hometown...ever since downhill, gpu and cpu's.

seriously your comment about judder??? the 390x is rumoured to be same price at titanX...
the 295x2 scores less bench than the 980 stock!??

the 295x2 has a massive increase in specs compared to the 980 but cant perform the same in bench??

sounds a lot like the bulldozer issues...high spec, s-h-i-t performance

Not sure what benchmarks you saw (can you show me the link?) but in the real tech press like I mentioned earlier (anandtech, techpowerup etc) the 295X2 thrashes the 980 and competes with 980 SLI. You cannot buy a faster graphics card. It beat the Titan Z (dual 780) so badly that Nvidia stopped making that card.

Of course being a dual GPU card it comes with its own issues (extra frame of latency and requires Crossfire profiles to work at max) and I find it hard to recommend because of that, but in raw fps terms it's unmatched.

I wouldn't recommend anybody switches from Nvidia to AMD right now - but anyone buying now for VR with a mind to the future is probably gonna be better served with a 290 or 290X compared to a 970 or 980. The only thing wrong with the AMD cards is their power consumption.

 

[Andovar]

That's a really bad PSU unfortunately.

Well, I think I'm just going to give it a go with this PSU and see what happens.
My only question would be is there any risk of component damage if the PSU can't handle it? Or does the PC just shut down if the psu gets taxed beyond what it can handle?

EDIT: you don't have to answer that. I started reading all the negative reviews and am now freakin paranoid!
I've had this system for 2 years without any major issues, but it there's no overclocking or any SLI/crossfire or anything like that, so maybe that's why it's been ok so far.
Now that i'm putting this OC beast of a vid card in it, I don't want to take any chances. Ordering a new PSU now...

 

[djbordie]

screw the bench here is the spec on the sapphire 295x2
Sapphire Radeon R9 295x2 8GB GDDR5 (21234-00-40G)
- 1018 MHz Clock, 5000 MHz Memory

not to mention the lack of driver/profile support for the crossfire.
honestly i dont trust this amd stuff.
too many angry customers as of late.

if you are using a 295x2 and the game doesnt have a crossfire support, it drops the performance down to that of a single 290x.

too finicky for me.

single 980, power house 1550/8000 simple OC and it will drive through the competition in most situations. the 295x2 bench marks seem to show it better than the 980 for 1440p and potential vr setups. but this is theoretical and in best of case circumstances.

again we have to wait to see the 390x or whatever is next, and also the 980ti.

but good ol sli 980s will smoke most anything VR has to offer these days and CV.

 

[adoredtv]

Well, I think I'm just going to give it a go with this PSU and see what happens.
My only question would be is there any risk of component damage if the PSU can't handle it? Or does the PC just shut down if the psu gets taxed beyond what it can handle?

EDIT: you don't have to answer that. I started reading all the negative reviews and am now freakin paranoid!
I've had this system for 2 years without any major issues, but it there's no overclocking or any SLI/crossfire or anything like that, so maybe that's why it's been ok so far.
Now that i'm putting this OC beast of a vid card in it, I don't want to take any chances. Ordering a new PSU now...

The PSU should be good enough but after reading all those reviews I also got a bit concerned about it.

They said it was 38A and realistically your PC won't even pull 30A, however the more stress you put on a PSU, the more likely something will fail if it's a weak link. I just didn't want you going in to it not realising the risk. You'll feel better knowing you have a high quality PSU in your PC anyway.

 

[adoredtv]

screw the bench here is the spec on the sapphire 295x2
Sapphire Radeon R9 295x2 8GB GDDR5 (21234-00-40G)
- 1018 MHz Clock, 5000 MHz Memory

not to mention the lack of driver/profile support for the crossfire.
honestly i dont trust this amd stuff.
too many angry customers as of late.

if you are using a 295x2 and the game doesnt have a crossfire support, it drops the performance down to that of a single 290x.

too finicky for me.

single 980, power house 1550/8000 simple OC and it will drive through the competition in most situations. the 295x2 bench marks seem to show it better than the 980 for 1440p and potential vr setups. but this is theoretical and in best of case circumstances.

again we have to wait to see the 390x or whatever is next, and also the 980ti.

but good ol sli 980s will smoke most anything VR has to offer these days and CV.

SLI and Crossfire have the same issues regarding lack of support. Normally Crossfire is a bit slower (see Elite) in non-AAA games though.

If you accept that drawback, the question is do you think it's worth paying $1100 instead of $600 for the same performance, because that's how much SLI 980's cost compared to a 295X2. If you only ever played AAA titles you'd simply have paid well over the odds for near identical performance.

As for angry customers of late, I need only look through this forum to see a slew of Nvidia owners with issues non-stop in Elite. I believe you made a thread a few days ago regarding driver problems? I read one of these daily here and almost never see any AMD problem threads, of course more people have Nvidia cards but the number of complaints just don't add up relatively.

 

[Soda Popinski]

When do you plan to get the DK2? If it's closer to the end of the year, you may want to wait for the CV1. Problem with that is, the 970 may be inadequate to run 120hz higher resolution. The Crescent Bay prototype is typically run on a 980.

I've got the 970 running a DK2 now, and for the most part it's fine. Everyone says the 980 is only 10% or so faster, but people seem to be able to push it to run DSR, which is something my 970 is clearly unable to handle without severe latency / stuttering issues. The price difference is really the killer.

Of course this may all be moot as Elite is clearly not optimized yet for VR. I'm sure when CV1 / Vive hits the market, Frontier will devote more resources to improve the VR experience. I'm hoping a 980 or 970 SLI rig won't be needed to run the CV1.

 

[Andovar]

You'll feel better knowing you have a high quality PSU in your PC anyway.

Exactly.

When do you plan to get the DK2? If it's closer to the end of the year, you may want to wait for the CV1.

Already ordered it over the weekend. Once i heard that the CV1 likely won't even be out for 2015, I decided it's probably worth taking the plunge now.

Plus by the time the CV1 comes out, the HTC/Steam one should be out. Plus I remember reading about some sony and samsung products in the works.
So I figure there will likely be several consumer options available in 2016. When I want to finally upgrade the DK2, it might not even be to the new rift. ...competition is good.

 

[djbordie]

my thread was regarding the switch from frontier to 1.3...not nvidia.
Mind you i have yet to update my nvidia, so maybe that was necc.

but i see you point. if the 295x2 works it works.

is the profile available for ED? is it worth waiting to see the 390x?

im still unclean how the 295x2 has lower clock and memory speeds than the single 980??? why would we want that...?

Sonda, the 980 in percentage doesnt sound impressive. im with you there.
My figures are 16% faster just on the clock speed when I had my 970 overclocked and my 980 overclocked.

however the 980 has more cuda cores, which is very important. Not to mention the 970 has the limited last 500mb or memory.
im not sure how much that plays in to it.

but my 980 (when oc'd) allows me to turn planet textures up to past the defaults (which is vram dependent), run dsr 2x in res and stations and have the gfx at high.
also for assetto corsa, it took away the judders that plagued certain tracks. (very vomit inducing in that game...)

so for the extra cost it works for me.

then come sli time its an absolute workhorse setup.

or sell and buy the next thing...

 

[adoredtv]

im still unclean how the 295x2 has lower clock and memory speeds than the single 980??? why would we want that...?

They are two completely different architectures. The 295X2 has 5632 Stream Processors at 1018 MHz while the 980 has 2048 Cuda Cores at 1216 MHz.

5632*1018 = 5733376

2048*1216 = 2490368

If Stream Processors and Cuda Cores were identical (they're not) then the 295 would be over twice as fast simply due to having more than double the amount of them, even though they are around 20% slower. In short though, you cannot compare clock speeds and core count across different architectures, only within the same architecture.

When it comes to memory the important thing is bandwidth and to a lesser degree compression.

Compare the 290X with the 980

The bandwidth of the 290X is much higher than the 980 because the 290X has a 512-bit memory bus compared to a 256-bit memory bus on the 980. That effectively means that the bandwidth of the 290X would be double - IF they had the same memory speeds. The 980 of course has much higher memory speed (7GHz vs 5GHz), however that's not enough to make up for only having half the bus-width.

So the 290X has 320 GB/s bandwidth compared to the 980's 224 GB/s. The 980 and all the Maxwell chips use colour compression though, which helps in some cases to alleviate the lack of bandwidth. However the lack of bandwidth is one of the reasons why the AMD cards generally catch up at higher resolutions, 4K and Eyefinity etc. The AMD cards are built for really heavy lifting GPU loads while the Nvidia cards are better at lower resolutions.

 

[djbordie]

interesting, nice explanation
thank you

would you sell your 980 and get a 295x2
buy another 980 when prices are lower
save up for the next gen AMD card
980ti?

 

[Elgered]

I can say the (my) 970 is a good card. I have neither troubles with whining coils nor did I ever reach the 3.5GB. My graphics settings are more than maxed out (tweaked some settings above the maximum and I use SweetFX) on 1920x1080 and the GPU runs around 80% load with 60fps and addresses a maximum of 2.8GB vram. But this also tells me, that for a wider 4k display, one card could be a bit weak

 

[adoredtv]

interesting, nice explanation
thank you

would you sell your 980 and get a 295x2
buy another 980 when prices are lower
save up for the next gen AMD card
980ti?

Assuming you mean for VR I wouldn't go SLI or Crossfire yet, as discussed in the thread about the toms hardware article in this subforum. The 980 Ti should be ~30% faster than the 980 but you might as well wait and see what AMD's new cards are all about (say 2 months or so). They are putting a lot of effort into VR and talking about it a lot, like they know they have the best solution.

For now though I would definitely keep your 980.

 

[djbordie]

cool thanks man, ya the 980s is fine for now for the price.

im just an upgrade sometimes...but I will obviously wait until HMD comes out.
who needs more than a 980 for a dk2...its when we get in to 1440p that we will see a need.

 

[JimDiGritz]

Might be a little off-topic here, but since I'm upgrading my vid card with the eventual goal of setting up a DK2, i think it applies.

So I've been looking at countless card comparisons on gpuboss, and scouring the reviews on newegg.
Basically looking between the Radeon R9 series, and the nvidia GTX 900 series.
I think the radeon is out mainly because the higher end of the r9 series are insane power hogs, and I don't feel like having to replace my power supply too.
So I think I pretty much settled on the GTX 970. But there's still two concerns. According to a lot of reviews, there's 2 problems with it:

1) coil whine.
I honestly don't know what this is, but it certainly sounds annoying.

2) only 3.5GB of "real" ram on the 4GB card?
Another one i'm not completely clear on. But apparently some of the cards have 512MB of cheaper/slower VRAM on them, and that can cause perf hits when under high load?

Are the GTX 970 users around here happy with theirs? Any issues? Any particular card vendor you prefer, or avoid?
Normally I would have just bought the damn thing by now, but for $350, I want to make sure I'm getting what I want.

Just built a new PC here:

i5 4690k oc @ 4400MHz
16Gb RAM
Asus Strix 970 with minimal overclocking (+175, +400 I think)

ED in the DK2 runs *very* smoothly at Low Settings, but at double resolution.

I tried a few DSR settings but found that it always introduced Judder. Double resolution makes a huge difference to sharpness and legibility - even without changing the HUD to green.

I can run ED at Medium however the space stations are very juddery inside.

I'll consider another 970 in SLI when I have the budget and if SLI & VR ever play really nicely together.

 

[Andovar]

ED in the DK2 runs *very* smoothly at Low Settings, but at double resolution.

I tried a few DSR settings but found that it always introduced Judder. Double resolution makes a huge difference to sharpness and legibility - even without changing the HUD to green.

What do you mean by 'double resolution', double of what? Is this some DK2 setting? (I don't have my DK2 yet)

 

[djbordie]

What do you mean by 'double resolution', double of what? Is this some DK2 setting? (I don't have my DK2 yet)

he meant "dynamic resolution" i think. there is no "double resolution".

 

[JimDiGritz]

What do you mean by 'double resolution', double of what? Is this some DK2 setting? (I don't have my DK2 yet)

I mean the resolution options in game.

I'm not at my PC right now but instead of 1920x1080 I set a supersampled resolution in the Windows settings of 2715x1527. This allows you to run the Oculus at the 2715x1527 (Downscaled to 1920x1080). The difference in clarity is night and day.